Vehicle hood latch systems are well known in the art. Typically, a vehicle hood or trunk deck will have a latch for engaging and cinching onto a striker. The latch will have a rotatably mounted ratchet or detent fork engaging a pawl in a ratchet relation. The detent fork cooperates with a mouth of the housing to pivot between an open and closed condition for receiving, engaging and cinching a keeper of a striker. The pawl retains the detent fork in the closed and cinched conditions.
Hood latches are required to have a secondary latching mechanism and a primary latching mechanism. The primary latching mechanism is operably from inside the vehicle, normally under the dashboard. A secondary latching is only operable from the outside. The secondary release lever is accessible only after the primary latching mechanism has been deployed, but is usually in a deployable position even though it is not accessible. In many cases, the location of the arm is difficult to find requiring the operator to probe blindly or bend over to look for the arm.
It is known to provide a release lever on the secondary latching mechanism which is presented only upon the release of the primary latch. Examples of such latch mechanism are described in U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,961601; 4,991,884; 5,000,493 and 5,141,265. However, such mechanisms require complicated linkages and levers, adding costs to the latch. As a result, the use of self presenting secondary release arms has been limited.